Poets Against the War

Sam Hamill
April 2003     ISBN: 1560255390

Poets Against the War can be traced back to the day when Sam Hamill received an invitation from Laura Bush to a White House Symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice." Upon opening her letter he was overcome by a sense of nausea and disgust, having only recently read George Bush's proposed "Shock and Awe" attack plan for Iraq, which called for saturation bombing.

Hamill's response was to compose a letter addressed to "Friends and Fellow Poets" in which he called upon writers to "reconstitute a Poets Against the War movement like the one organized to speak out against the war in Vietnam." He asked each writer "to speak up for the conscience of our country and lend his or her name to our petition against this war" by submitting "a poem or statement of conscience to the Poets Against the War website."

The response was overwhelming. Over 13,000 poems were donated by nearly 11,000 poets. Poets Against the War is an anthology of the best poems submitted to the website and is both a cry against impending war and a celebration of the long and rich tradition of moral opposition and dissent by American writers and artists.

Sam Hamill is the Editor (and co-founder) of Copper Canyon Press and the author of thirteen volumes of original poetry, three collections of essays and twenty-four volumes translated from ancient Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Latin and Estonian. He is the recipient of more than a dozen major fellowships and awards over the past thirty years.